


The Single-Sock Theory

by LauraDoloresIssum



Category: Changeling: The Lost
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Fae & Fairies, Fairies, Fairy Tale Elements, Friendship, Gen, Philosophy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-18
Updated: 2017-02-18
Packaged: 2018-09-25 11:01:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9817046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LauraDoloresIssum/pseuds/LauraDoloresIssum
Summary: The Motley float serious questions about the nature of humanity, and come up with an unexpectedly good (and funny) answer.





	

It was getting late. They were all seated around the living room, their Masks burned away. Annie Stock took up the entire leather couch by herself, a vast hulking form rippling with muscle and scars. For five years, she had been an arena fighter, and the remains of her face were dwarfed by the large tusks projecting from her lower jaw. The frame creaked in protest as she shifted and propped her head up with one furry arm. Her projecting hooves, nearly sixteen inches in diameter, brushed the top of Tommy Roundhouse’s hair as he sat on the floor pressed up to the side of the armrest, his sticklike limbs pulled up to his chest. Even making no effort, he seemed to recede into the background. None of them knew his history, and out of respect they did not press him. They knew only that he liked keeping to the shadows and had a very large collection of knives. He tossed his red newsboy cap onto the loveseat, directly onto the book Cassandra Will-O-Wisp was reading. She tossed it back without comment and continued what she’d been doing. Cass was barely there, as frail and colorless as a sheet of paper. She had been a librarian during her Durance, shelving and organizing and labeling but not allowed to read what she touched, so these days she carried a book with her everywhere. Liam Glimmerglass’s reflective eyes watched silently from their perch atop the bookcase next to the prop TV, bending their long body forward so as not to scrape the ceiling with their antlers. Their form was more human than Annie’s, at least at first, but there was more than a dollop of Keeper in the way their body flowed through space that the others avoided looking at. Alec Bourbon was pouring the drinks, of course. Only a little smaller than Annie, his mass of thorny hair came close to brushing the ceiling, looking like a vast oak uprooted and standing in the middle of their living room.

The curtains were shut and the room felt enclosed, a little bubble of community that they could all pretend wouldn’t be popped by the slightest outside intrusion. The table was already scattered with half-empty bottles and glasses, and everyone except Liam (who didn’t drink) and Cass (who couldn’t get drunk) were starting to feel the effects.

They had been light and merry for much of the evening. They had tried to explain MTV to Alec (who had begun his Durance in early 1963), and watched raucously over Liam’s shoulder as they struggled to work an iPhone, finally throwing it aside and releasing a few very Victorian insults after it. They had played some Cards Against Humanity with a custom Arcadian deck from a goblin who ran a little store down the street, and laughed until they all had to lie down. Cass played some Panic! At The Disco, and Liam and Tommy both got up and danced a bit homoerotically, to everyone’s amusement. Alec and Annie had both downed prodigious amounts of liquor, of course.

Now, however, the candles around the room were burning lower and the wild hilarity had worn off. Tommy was partly asleep by the couch, and Liam had climbed atop the book case and pushed himself into a corner. Cass was lying on her belly with her feet up like a little girl, with her translucent face in her third novel of the night. Alec, exceedingly drunk by now, pushed his barklike face up to a candle, and narrowed his slitted eyes to watch the flame.

“What do you think makes us human?” he asked the silent room at large, rather slurred.

“Say what?” mumbled Tommy, raising his head.

“You’re drunk, both of you,” Cass commented as she turned a page.

“I’m always drunk,” said Alec, slowly passing his hand back and forth through the flame. “It makes me a happy man.”

“Or just a sot,” Liam said in thick cockney from their perch atop the bookcase. They sat in so much shadow they were practically a wraith. The others couldn’t see much more than the outlines of their antlers and the gleam off their eyes, although one hairless, distended leg dangled over the side of the bookcase.

“Hey, alcoholism is a disease, sonny,” Alec said, pointing one branchlike finger in his direction.

The Fairest shrugged noncommittally. “It hasn’t any opinion. In its day, he simply would have been called a sot.”

Tommy thwacked his cap against Annie’s hooves in irritation. “Liam, stop calling yourself it. It’s kinda a problem.”

Liam ignored him. “In any case, liquor doesn’t affect him the same way as a human. He can’t be affected by a human’s disease.”

“Bringing me back to my point. It sounds like worthless hot air, maybe, but there’s somethin’ to it.” He snatched gently at the air as though to coax the idea into being. “I mean, what makes us, right here, still more person than the evil fucks that did this to us, Liam?”

“It doesn’t know. It doesn’t remember being human very well.”

“You’re asking us to nail down a pretty deep question, Alec,” said Cass. “Nobody knows what makes someone human. Or what makes being a human different from being a person.”

He refilled his glass and drained it. “Bu’ _we_ shouldow,” he insisted. “We… we’ve been through human.” He shook his head violently, and steam issued from his skin as he sobered up slightly. “What stuck in us that made us strong enough to escape?” he continued. “There’s gotta be something…” he waved a hand fruitlessly, “you know, something _solid_ there.”

“Empathy, maybe,” muttered Annie in a soft Tennessee lilt. “Caring enough to remember our old homes and enough to go with other people or let them come with us. It’s groups that escape most often, I find.”

“Emp’thy,” Alec mused, and refilled his glass again, clearly aiming for getting smashed at least once more. “Good.”

“I think it’s clear that escape takes something fundamentally human,” said Cass. “But the real question is, is there some measure of human you can have while still not being one? How much of human makes one, if that makes sense? Can we actually we human enough to not be faerie, but still too faerie to be human?”

“One can’t measure humanity by the teaspoonfuls,” said Liam quietly. “It doesn’t work like that.”

She sat up and looked up to where they were sitting. “So, you think being a little bit human is like being a little bit pregnant? You either are or you aren’t?”

Liam was silent a while. “It can speak for no one but itself,” they said slowly, like they were easing the words out from somewhere painful. “It only knows that it is not a human now. It used to be human, and it remembers a little what it felt then; stale bread and filthy air, and cold fingers, mostly. But there was something else, something that it lost afterwards in Arcadia; empathy, maybe, like Annie said. A feeling of… connection. Of being _with_ humans and caring about what happens to them, rather than simply existing _around_ them. Now, they’re just,” their face twisted a little, “they’re like dolls. They look like people, but there’s nothing but stuffing inside. It hurts it to look at them, sometimes.”

“That sounds pretty human to me,” said Cass. “Especially if it makes you uncomfortable. A Keeper would never have a feeling like that.”

“But if it isn’t a whole human, then it can’t properly be called one. It’s just a broken, ruined human that still has most of its moving parts.” They hugged their arms around their chest.

“You’re too gloomy tonight, Liam,” Alec said. “Have a drink.”        

Tommy sat up and yawned, revealing a mouthful of needlelike teeth. He climbed onto the couch and sat on Annie's furry flank. His Brooklyn accent wavered, then reasserted itself. “I think being human is that feeling you get when you put your laundry in and start the machine, then you turn around and see one dirty sock lying on the floor.”

Annie shoved him gently. “So, your theory is, so long as we’re incompetent at doing our laundry…”

“Think about it,” he insisted. “ _They_ never would have made that mistake. They’re too OCD. Even if it’s not one of those washing machines that locks, it’s still disrupted their pattern, and you know how they hate that. They’d just get angry at it—”

“—Set the sock on fire for daring to fall out of the hamper,” said Cass.

“Yes, exactly! Or if they’re Gentry enough, just snap their fingers and change reality so it never happened. But humans don’t do either of those things. We just get that lame-ass, disappointed-frustrated-laugh-at-ourselves feeling, and then we pick it up and throw back into the dirty clothes pile for next time. There’s a sort of mundane incompetence and acceptance that comes with being human, from making a thousand tiny mistakes every day, and not being so obsessed with perfection that it drives us insane. Maybe _that’s_ what makes us stronger than them.”

“That seems like a pretty good theory, actually,” admitted Annie, tipping her near-empty glass over her open mouth. “No thanks, Alec, I think I’ve had enough. So have you, honestly.”

“A mundane, prosaic yardstick for a mundane and prosaic lot of beings,” Liam mused. “Actually pretty brilliant. But what does it mean if you leave two socks behind?”

“I don’t know,” Tommy admitted, grinning his too-wide slasher smile and taking a short swig from his bottle. “I’ll need funding to study the problem further. Lots and lots of funding.”

“It can pay you in shiny stones and goblin teeth,” Liam said. “Apart from that, it hasn’t any money.”

“Then get a job, you lazy-ass fairy.” He grinned. “Get it? Fairy?”

“It doesn’t understand.”

“‘Cause you’re British. And you’re gay.”

“…It still doesn’t understand. It thought Alec just said it was too unhappy.”

He scoffed and turned over. “Oh, you’re hopeless. Annie, you’re comfy. I’m sleeping on top of you.”

“You aren’t right now, unless you want free flying lessons.” She pushed him off and heaved herself up (the couch creaked loudly and rose several inches). “I’m brushing my teeth.”

Liam jumped lightly down off the bookcase and plucked their coat off the hall rack. Cass followed.

“Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“You… live here with us, remember?”

They looked nonplussed. “It has a room here. It lives in the Hedge.”

There would be no convincing them. She sighed a little. “Travel safe, then. This city is full of weirdos.”

“And how. Goodnight, all.” They heard Annie call goodnight from the bathroom, then the front door closed.

Tommy yawned again, the guttering candles glinting startlingly off his teeth. The first flame finally went out, releasing a trail of smoke like a dying breath. “I worry about them. They’re kinda bonkers.”

“No shit, sonny?” muttered Alec morosely, picking up the first of the empty bottles. “I drink, you screw like a goat, Annie beats people’s heads in for a living, Cass just lives inside a fortress of Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe. Look at what happened to us for years, of course we’re all fucked in the head. And when we wake up tomorrow, we’re still gonna be fucked in the head, and I’m gonna have to see who’s made out of sticks and trash and doesn’t know it, unless I’ve succeeded in getting a good enough hangover.”

“Yeah, but I think they’re a special kind of bonkers, being stuck there so much longer. It sucks, they’re really hot and a good dancer.” Tommy considered for a moment. “I’d still do them.”

“Like I said, screws like a goat.”

“Anyway,” said Cass, “I thought you were just into women.”

“I am. I don’t care. They’re hot.”

Annie appeared, surprisingly quietly, in the doorway. “Bathroom’s free.”

“Hey Annie, do you think Liam would sleep with me?”

“I don’t think so, Tommyknocker, but you could ask.”

“I’m gonna go stick my head in a rainbucket and sing the national anthem,” Alec muttered, and staggered out clutching the empty bottles.

Tommy looked at the others. “Was that supposed to be a joke?”

“With Alec? I don’t know how you’d tell.” Cass gathered her things off the loveseat. “I’m going to bed too. Goodnight.”

Annie lay down on the couch again and Tommy’s knotted little form cuddled on top of her. They lay there for a while, watching the candles go out, each thinking their own thoughts.

“Did you really mean what you said about the socks?” Annie asked quietly.

“Actually, at the time Liam was just being depressing and I thought it lightened the mood. But the more I think about it, the more I think I might have stumbled onto the best idea I’ve ever had.”

Annie dreamt that night of being back in the arena, throwing washing machines that sank through the floor like they were in a tar pit. The wood rotted through and the stone cracked like cheap plaster. The sky began to fall. Her Keeper appeared before her and asked what she had expected to accomplish with defiance.

“Do you want fries with that?” she asked, and beat him with a pair of balled-up socks until he stopped moving.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, I appreciate it. Please feel free to leave comments or questions, and may you each remember the stray sock just in time.


End file.
